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Frozen Bananas
Cut six large, ripe, red bananas crosswise, in very thin slices; add half a pound of powdered sugar to them, let them stand an hour, then add a quart of water and the grated peel of a lemon. When the sugar is dissolved put the fruit in the freezer, and freeze as you would ice cream. Pineapples, oranges, and berries may be frozen in the same manner. A pint of cream, whipped stiff, may be added if liked.
This is a water ice rather than a frozen dessert in the ice-cream sense: fruit, sugar, water, and churning. A few of the terms and the equipment need translating.
- "The freezer" is a churnIn 1900 this means a hand-crank ice-cream freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. An electric ice-cream maker does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Powdered sugarPeriod "powdered" sugar is finely ground granulated sugar with no cornstarch, not modern confectioners' sugar. Half a pound is about one cup plus two tablespoons of granulated sugar by weight, or roughly 225 g; ordinary granulated dissolves fine given the hour of standing.
- Red bananasA shorter, plumper variety with a faint raspberry note, sold in some Latin and Caribbean markets. Regular Cavendish bananas work; use them very ripe, heavily freckled, or the ice will taste flat and starchy.
- The maceration hour mattersLetting the sliced fruit sit in sugar draws out juice and softens the flesh, which is what keeps a banana ice from freezing into grit. Do not shorten it, and stir once or twice.
- Texture of the baseThin slices left whole will freeze into hard chips. Mash or briefly blend the macerated fruit before adding the water if you want a smooth ice; the original assumes the churn dasher will break it down, which a modern machine does less aggressively.
- Lemon peelGrate only the yellow zest, no pith, and use an unwaxed lemon since the peel goes into the mix unstrained. A little lemon juice, a tablespoon or so, also keeps the bananas from browning.
- With creamThe optional pint of whipped cream turns this into something closer to a mousse-textured frozen dessert; folding it in once the mixture is partly frozen rather than at the start is the safer course, since prolonged churning can work whipped cream into butter grains.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts without the cream, more with it. Serve within a day or two, as banana ices dull and darken in the freezer.
Frozen fruit ices of this kind sit at the cheap end of the Victorian and Edwardian dessert repertoire: no eggs, no custard, no cooking, just fruit and sugar and a great deal of cranking. Their appearance in a general household book like this one reflects the spread of the domestic ice-cream freezer, patented in various forms through the nineteenth century and, by 1900, a common enough item to be assumed rather than described. Bananas themselves were the surprise here. Faster steamship traffic had made them widely and cheaply available in American cities by the 1890s, and the red-skinned varieties, less durable in shipping than the yellow, carried a certain novelty in the fruiterer's window. The closing line, that pineapples, oranges and berries may be treated the same way, is typical of the period's approach: one method, printed once, applied to whatever the market had.